Now Back It Up

Hi everyone! My name is Ari, class of 2015, and I am currently a freshman at Olin. I'm really excited to be blogging for the OLINsider. Check out my profile here, and look out for more posts in the future by me!

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My first blog post was going to be fun. It was going to be about how awesome Olin is, and how I am making full use of a semester of pass/no record by engaging in all sorts of adventures and shenanigans. My first blog post was going to be bursting with enthusiasm for what the next four years have in store for me.

Lesson 1: Life often doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE OLIN. But unlike the upperclassmen who made a point of parading around the freshman chanting, "Play more, pass no record. Work less, pass no record," during our first week here, I have my own (sad) reasons for saying...

Lesson 2: Thank goodness for pass / no record.

The story goes like this. Since Olin is an environment-friendly place that is conscious of saving energy, the classroom lights in the Academic Center have motion sensors, and turn off if the room is "empty" for a certain period of time. I was in the ModCon lab on Tuesday night, working with my bread board*, when the lights went out.

*I have just discovered bread boards for the first time, and I must say, the colorful wires are fabulous.

Somewhere in between trying to turn the lights back on and using my laptop as a flashlight to make my way through the dark, I ended up dropping and flattening my laptop. I corrupted the hard drive, which I hadn't backed up in quite some time... and now it's sitting on a shelf in IT looking like this:

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Lesson 3: Back up your files, always.

Want to know what the worst part is? I carry these things around on a daily basis inside my backpack:

So I end my first blog post with a promise and a condition: I promise I will blog about more fun things in the future, if you promise you will not make the same mistakes that I made and back up your files. I don't care what you use -- save it on the network, on a flash drive, in Dropbox -- but just make sure you have copies of your important documents somewhere. You'll thank yourself for it later.

See you on the flip side once I finish recovering from all the work I lost!